Who are those Hungarians, anyway?
February 13, 2007
Jónapot kívánok!
Well, I’ve been abroad for over a month and I just finished my first week of classes. I have shopped around, checked costs and I have narrowed down my list:
- Number Theory
- Topics in Geometry
- Elementary Problem-Solving
- Combinatorics
- Hungarian Arts & Culture
I had an interesting first day of Number Theory last week with one of the most energetic Number Theorists I’ve met (well, I haven’t met many Number Theorists, but still, he’s an energetic Mathematician). My professor for the first day was Csaba Szabó (he has the coolest Hungarian name thus far). He was very entertaining and told us to solve a math problem involving Mathematicians captured by cannibals (which is a very interesting math problem, where we tried to find out how many Mathematicians can be saved). When he was discussing our syllabus, he put a big ‘F’ on the board not for the final exam; rather, for the Feast, which is not a test; instead, a celebration of Number Theory. While he is entertaining, I am very intimidated by him. I will miss his enthusiasm, but the other Number Theory professor is good too. 
I sat in on a Geometry course, and I absolutely loved it! My professor for that is amazing. It will be an interesting class, because we will concentrate on the algebraic properties in geometry—mostly groups of transformations in metric spaces for you mathematicians out there. I didn’t like Combinatorics at first, but it’s getting better.
Fruits…finally. I went grocery shopping yesterday to buy apples and bananas (I wanted to eat, eat, eat them). It took me two attempts at two different grocery stores to figure out how to buy fruits. At the first place I tried to buy apples, but the person at the checkout wouldn’t let me; she held back the apples. She started talking in Hungarian, and she I thought held them back because she didn’t know the price. At the second store, I realized that I needed to weigh the fruits first and put a price tag on them. So I did that, but there was a huge line at the checkout, so I decided to opt out again and put the fruits back. Unfortunately, they make it really hard to exit the grocery stores and I forgot how to say “excuse me”. So I price-checked everything again, and eventually I got my fruits.
So, who are those Hungarians, anyway?
Let me tell you a story. Stories make up who we are, and some of the stories we tell form a collective story—a national identity. This is one of those stories—the story of the last cherry pit. Imagine that you know nothing about Hungary or Hungarians (and perhaps you don’t).
Imagine that only four Hungarians were left in Hungary and lived under a cherry tree. One Hungarian was hard of hearing and two were apparently under police inspection (even though the police were long gone by now). The last one was the only one with a name—Sipos. Eventually these last Hungarians would die, but they wanted future generations to remember who the Hungarians were. They thought long and hard about this. One thought a cherry pit between two rocks would be a good remembrance. The others weren’t sure, but they couldn’t think of anything better, so they decided it would do. Unfortunately, a cherry pit was no where to be found, because they ground up all the cherry pits for food. One eventually spotted a cherry pit at the top of a tall tree, but the tree was too tall for him to reach. So three of them made a column and the one that was hard of hearing climbed on top of the others forming a taller column. When he was at the top within reaching distance of the pit, he forgot why he was there in the first place. The others yelled for him to grab the cherry pit, but he didn’t hear anything. So they remained there forever—one Hungarian top of the other. (This is a paraphrased version of the story by István örkény).
These are the Hungarians. Hopeless. Pessimistic. Feeling of being watched. Wanting to be recognized. We also read a poem that depicts a gray Danube, which flows between the East (Pest) and West (Buda), but in this poem, Buda represents the Soviet Union and Pest means the Western world. So, Hungarians are not sure of their place in this world; they were locked in Central Europe between two ideologies. Hungarians feel this even today, because they are part of the European Union and have a parliamentary form of government, yet the Socialists are the ruling party. Because of all this, their national identity has suffered, and in turn, each of their personal identities. Hungary sounds like a pretty depressing place, eh? You could look at it that way. The Hungarians don’t; rather, they make light of their misfortune.
We had a lecture on Hungarian history at the beginning of our program and the lecturer talked about every superpower that trampled through Hungary, and he laughed off each one. Oh the Nazis. Oh the Soviets. Since Hungary is over a millennium old, has been bullied by so many powers and has shrunk in size, foreign relations in Central Europe is really complicated (as anywhere). It is especially complicated because over a million Hungarians don’t even live in Hungary (but they did, or their family did at some point). No one forgets what happened in the past; it’s part of their collective story, which affects the Hungary I see today and also the future.
In spite of all the bad things that have happened to Hungary, they are very nationalistic—even more than Oles. I attended the first day of Historical Aspects of Mathematics, and my professor wanted to make it painfully clear any historical connection, how ever small, that Hungary had with the evolution of Math.
What do Hungarians look like? Another anecdote. One of my professors went to Sky City, New Mexico and was excited that there was a Church of St. Stephen (St. Stephen [István] is very important to the Hungarians). He met the pastor and asked if he knew who St. Stephen was. The pastor responded, “Yes! He was a Hungarian.” So my professor said he was Hungarian, but the pastor did not believe him because “Hungarians are black.” My professor chuckled. Then he walked in the church and there was a fresco above the alter with a black St. Stephen. No, that was not a depiction of the typical Hungarian, for Hungarians are 92% homogeneous. Even so, Hungarians are very ethnically diverse. I was told by a Hungarian that they are the most ethnically diverse population (though, a Hungarian would say that). You can not tell a Hungarian from a line-up. The only noticeable difference is between white Hungarians and the Roma (gypsy) population, and there is a lot of discrimination against the Roma population.
Anyway, thanks for all your emails and support!
Viszontlátásra!
Daniel